Christopher Altieri who worked for a long time in the English section of Vatican Radio and now writes for the Catholic Herald and Catholic World Report - and who, in the past two years, often tried his best to give this pope the benefit of the doubt even in his most critical articles, but seems to have taken a harder line lately - has written the only commentary I have seen so far about the pope's recent grandstanding stunts regarding the Chilean bishop scandals. In which the pope has played, cleverly he thinks, to a watchful media audience, in laicizing Fr Karadima and more questionably, two Chilean bishops (Does the pope have the faculty to laicize bishops at all, especially without due process?) for abuse-related misdeeds. But this is all random and devised for theatrical and media effect rather than as part of a rational and prescribed course of justice that is applied uniformly to everyone.
So he still keeps Cardinal Errazuriz on his advisory Council of Nine despite the latter's admitted failures to act on Karadima at all and to simply ignore complaints against other bishops during the long time he was Primate of Chile; as well as Cardinal Ezzati of Santiago, Errazuriz's successor, who is being investigated by Chile's civilian justice system for his role in covering up cases of clerical abuse. Not to mention Bergoglio's Teflon-encased 'vice pope', Cardinal Maradiaga who coordinates the C9 and whose home diocese of Tegucigalpa Bergoglio himself ordered investigated for sexual and financial anomalies by one of his bishop agents from Argentina. In short, Bergoglio is as capriciously selective as ever as to whom he punishes and whom he chooses to keep close to him. (See Sandro Magister's recent commentary on the persons Bergoglio can't seem to be rid of.) Too bad Altieri does not look at this side of the coin in his analysis.
Justice by papal fiat points to serious
lack of trust within the Church
Pope Francis cannot earn back trust simply with piecemeal displays
of raw power exercised capriciously over relatively 'small fry'
by Christopher R. Altieri
October 15, 2018
The Vatican announced on Saturday that Pope Francis has reduced two Chilean bishops to the lay state. One of the defrocked is an 85-year-old man reported now to be suffering senile dementia, Francisco José Cox Huneeus, who was bishop of La Serena from 1990 to 1997. The other is 53-year-old Marco Antonio Órdenes Fernández, who served as bishop of Iquique from 2006 to 2012.
Allegations against Mr. Cox go back at least to 1974, the documentation of which contains gruesome details. Mr. Órdenes had what can only be described as a meteoric rise, becoming in 2006 the youngest bishop in Chile’s history, at age 42. He would retire a half-dozen years later, citing ill health.
Órdenes has apparently lived a quiet and secluded life since handing in his letter, while Cox bounced around for a while — with the help of another high-ranking Chilean prelate (and Cox’s confrère in the Schönstatt fraternity, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz — before settling at the Schönstatt General House in Germany sometime in 2002.
(The best nutshell version of Cox’s and Órdenes’s stories is to be found in the e-pages of Crux, where readers will also find a succinct rehearsal of the Vatican’s involvement in the rise of both men, along with details regarding the management of each man’s fall.)
There can be no real doubt that the men merit the most severe punishment.
While no one can reasonably deny that the men thus reduced deserved at least what they got from Pope Francis, the manner in which the Holy Father has done the thing brings questions of his ability to govern the Church into tight focus. The statement announcing the moves came on Saturday. CWR’s translation from the Spanish follows:
The Holy Father has dismissed from the clerical state Francisco José Cox Huneeus, Archbishop emeritus of La Serena (Chile), member of the Institute of the Schönstatt Fathers, and Marco Antonio Órdenes Fernández, Bishop emeritus of Iquique (Chile).
In both cases, Article 21 § 2.2 of the motu proprio Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela has been applied, as a consequence of manifest acts of abuse of minors.
The decision adopted by the Pope last Thursday, October 11, 2018, admits no recourse.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has already notified the interested parties, through their respective superiors, in their respective residences. Francisco José Cox Huneeus will continue to be part of the Institute of Schönstatt Fathers.
Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela is the piece of special legislation governing the gravest delicts — the most serious crimes — in canon law. Article 21 § 2.2 states that
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has ordinary jurisdiction over such crimes, may present the gravest of the most grave cases to the Pope for his decision with regard to dismissal from the clerical state or deposition, together with dispensation from the law of celibacy, when it is manifestly evident that the delict was committed and after having given the guilty party the possibility of defending himself".
-
The Vatican, in other words, was at pains to make it clear that this was Pope Francis’s decision.
- It was also a decision taken outside the Church’s normal system of judicial procedure: in short,
Cox and Órdenes were laicized with no judicial process — no trial — to speak of.
Even in normal circumstances, canonical trials are paperwork affairs — conducted in secret, to boot — and that is a problem. Said simply: (at risk of sounding like a broken record) justice must be seen to be done. There must be independent investigations conducted in the light of day, and reasonably transparent processes for the adjudication of criminal charges against clerics high and low.
Vatican City has the rudiments of such investigative and judicial mechanisms, and has used them recently in connection with crimes both financial and moral. For reasons both juridical-political and practical, the Vatican City system could not possibly be used to process canonical cases.
Nevertherless, the existence of the system shows that the Church at the highest levels of governance is not unfamiliar with either the process or the reasons for it
In any case, Cox and Fernandez received summary justice by papal fiat — and that is a bigger problem.
If the Church’s continued use of secret trials is a hindrance to the recovery of trust, insofar as it renders reasonable persons incapable of confidence in her capacity to administer justice, so much more will
naked exercises of raw power serve to undermine and indeed destroy the very ground on which any such confidence must be based: the reasonable belief in the Church’s own bona fide commitment to doing justice at all.
With specific regard to the Chilean theater of the global crisis, there can be no doubt, but that Pope Francis faces a terrible dilemma.
When the bishops of Chile resigned en masse in May of this year, they created a serious conundrum for Pope Francis. Basically, they left him with a set of three alternatives: accept all the resignations and start from scratch; accept some of the resignations and sit on others; accept none of the resignations and proceed piecemeal.
Each of the three options poses its own set of peculiar dangers, and none of them is without a downside. Francis seems to have opted for an out-of-the-box hybrid solution in Chile, somewhere between door number two and door number three. Seems, one says, because
Pope Francis has not shared his plan with the faithful — not even in broad strokes — even as he has constantly insisted we are all in this together. [Because he is playing it by ear, it seems, and not with any particular rhyme or reason!]
While the breakdown in trust among bishops and bodies of the faithful in virtually every ecclesiastical jurisdiction is heartbreaking and truly scandalous, there appears to be an even more grievous breakdown in trust within the bishops’ own ranks. The dilemma facing Pope Francis with regard to the world’s bishops is even more terrible than the one facing him in Chile: he can’t trust any of them.
Pope Francis also appears also to be wary of the faithful. In his recent letter to Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl accepting his resignation and congratulating him on a job well done after the Cardinal’s defensiveness and lack of candor lost him the confidence of the clergy and the faithful in his archdiocese, Pope Francis wrote:
I recognize in your request the heart of the shepherd who, by widening his vision to recognize a greater good that can benefit the whole body (cf. Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium, 235), prioritizes actions that support, stimulate and make the unity and mission of the Church grow above every kind of sterile division sown by the father of lies who, trying to hurt the shepherd, wants nothing more than that the sheep be dispersed (cf. Matthew 26:31).
Whatever else these lines do,
they certainly tend to confirm the worst suspicions of those, who read his series of September fervorini as showing that he believes the faithful to be a ginned-up mob, and at best the tools and playthings of the Devil.
From his dismissal of the faithful in the small Chilean diocese on which he foisted the hapless and unready Bishop Juan Barros —
“Osorno is suffering because it is dumb,”— to his juxtaposition — if not comparison — of the faithful desirous of transparency and accountability from the Church’s leaders to the bloodthirsty crowds calling for Christ’s crucifixion, Francis has shown astounding insensitivity to the concerns of the faithful. If his eyes were ever opened to the callousness of his disregard for the real hurt of the people he professes to love, it appears he has repented of his discovery.
Perhaps it is the case that Pope Francis himself believes — as the Catholic News Agency’s level-headed and judicious JD Flynn in an excellent piece of news analysis recently speculated Vatican officials may believe —
that the crisis in the Church is somehow playing out as a referendum on his leadership?
It is certain that elements in the Church are using the crisis to make political hay. This weekend, during a press conference to mark the anniversary of the final apparition of Our Lady of Fatima, the bishop of Leiria-Fátima, Cardinal Antonio Marto called l’Affaire Viganò an “ignoble attack” on Pope Francis. “[The whole business] is nothing more than a political montage, with no real foundation,” he said. At best, he’s half right.
Even without Viganò’s extraordinary “testimonies” — the original 11-page letter and the follow-up, to both of which Cardinal Marc Ouellet responded last weekend — we have more than enough to know there is rot in the Church that reaches the Curia. We need to discover the extent of its spread and the vectors of its spreading.
The Archbishop of Munich and Friesing and C9 member, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, admitted as much at a press event October 5th to launch a training initiative on safeguarding efforts at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University.
“[The crisis with its fallout] has not been caused by the press doing their job properly,” he said. “It’s caused by the Church leadership.” [Does Marx - who has a preeminent position of Church leadership not just in Germany but as a member of the pope's C9 - include himself in this denunciation?]
Said simply, the faithful have a right to know.
In order to begin to address the crisis at its root, Pope Francis needs to earn back some small measure of trust. He simply cannot do that by displays of raw power given piecemeal against old men who used to be someone, or secluded perverts that nobody likes and few even realized were still breathing.
Instead, he needs to come up with a plan for reform apt to produce the necessary transparency in governance — especially insofar as the administration of justice is concerned — and he needs to be transparent about that. If he has such a plan, he needs to submit it to the faithful, who have rights in the Church both moral and legal.
Even the Archbishop-emeritus of Washington, DC, Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl — a close adviser and papal favorite — admitted as much when pressed. “Yes,” he told CWR this past August, “the laity do have a place: they have a moral place — a right in that sense — to participate in whatever is going on in the life of the Church.” So, do victims of wicked clerics. So, do the men accused of wicked deeds, though it does not gratify our thirst for vengeance to say so.
Even if they did not, the laity are a resource Pope Francis simply cannot afford not to tap.
“Give him time,” said Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, at a recent press briefing on the doings of the Synod Assembly underway in Rome, in response to a question regarding what the attitude of the faithful should be with respect to Pope Francis’s leadership.
With due respect to Archbishop Scicluna —
who may be the closest thing to a good guy one is like to find in this whole sordid business — Pope Francis has had plenty of that.
[And in all the cases we are aware of, 'acted' only when faced with no other choice but to 'show' he was doing something about this problem. Otherwise, he has simply shrugged off negative facts about his pets (as with Ricca to this day, and McCarrick before July 2018 and the New York Archdiocesan investigation that concluded the latter had sexually molested a teenager four decades ago.
As to Altieri's remark about Scicluna: Does Joseph Ratzinger, the man who, among the long list of things he did as CDF Prefect and Pope to correct the internal conditions that led to the 'pandemic' of clerical sex abuse in the 1970s through the 1990s, gave Scicluna the function and authority to investigate and prosecute high-profile Church offenders, get no credit at all as 'a good guy in this whole sordid business'?]
Meanwhile, the Washington Times has done a great job of illustrating the following article - not just the pope's mouth is locked but his entire face...
The pope at a loss for words
By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
October 16, 2018
Back in late August, Pope Francis declared that he would “not say a word” about a letter from a former Vatican envoy to Washington who claimed, among other things, that the pope had ignored sexual abuse charges made against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, formerly archbishop of Washington.
The letter was written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, and it also implicated the present archbishop of Washington in a cover-up of Archbishop McCarrick’s decades of misbehavior. That would be Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Well, now as of Friday Cardinal Wuerl’s resignation as archbishop has been accepted by the pope. So is the pope going to continue to remain mum?
In accepting Cardinal Wuerl’s resignation Friday,
the pope said [COLORE=#B200Forls in centuries?
- Is that all that he is going to say?
His continued silence is characteristic of the pope and typical of the Vatican. He has still said very little about the predatory behavior of an astonishingly large number of American Catholic priests. [I think the little he has said speaks volumes in itself - he underlined that that the situation has greatly improved since most of the abuse incidents reported in the USA took place before 2002 (when the CDF was given the lead responsibility for dealing with all abuse complaints ignored or unacted upon by local bishops)]. In the diocese of Pittsburgh alone, 300 errant priests were mentioned in an August grand jury report that goes back 70 years.
Why is the pope so reluctant to speak out? Archbishop Vigano also leveled charges against the pope himself. Is the pope going to address those charges honestly?
His silence and euphemistic references to the heinous acts committed by American clerics is going to ensnare him in an even bigger crisis. Archbishop Vigano has already asked the pope to resign. This could get much worse. Around the world other voices could sound for the pope’s resignation.
Now there are indications that Cardinal Wuerl and the pope are working on Cardinal Wuerl’s replacement as archbishop. It is suspected that they are angling toward a candidate very similar to Cardinal Wuerl. That could be a disaster.
- It is time that the hierarchy of the church understood that the laity will not tolerate sending its children to schools and churches where abusive priests lurk.
- It is time for the laity and the faithful clerics in the church to take action and eliminate these predators.
The hierarchy has charge of the church in doctrinal matters and even in administrative matters. The laity, however, controls the purse strings. We are not living in the late Middle Ages.
There has sprung up a middle class over the past 500 to 600 years that has changed things radically for the Catholic hierarchy. It controls a huge amount of the church’s assets. Moreover, the hierarchy controls very little wealth. Its vast land holdings have vanished. The bishops and cardinals ought to adjust their arrogance to these realities. Already American Catholics, rich and not-so-rich, are calling for the faithful to pull back on their donations. It will set back the bishops’ budgets very rapidly.
Donations are already down. I am told that parishes are experiencing as much a 50 percent decline in their weekly collections. My guess is that very soon church budgets are going to have to be adjusted to the new reality brought on by disgruntled parishioners. The cuts will be made quickly.
Already seasonal galas are being canceled. At one parish in St. Augustine, Florida, its fall celebration has been called off. The gala was scheduled for this month, but with the present scandals still going on contributions have cratered. Such cancellations are going to be repeated in the months ahead all over America. The smug hierarchy of the church ought to take heed.
The pope can dispense with his talk of the “nobility” of “mistakes” that were made by men such as Cardinal Wuerl. These “mistakes” were in most cases heinous crimes. They left a scar on thousands of the faithful, both those who were accosted by these degenerate clerics and those who were the young people’s parents and friends. There is no denying the fact that the behavior of a few has weakened the church of all the faithful.
It is time for Pope Francis to acknowledge that he has presided over the Catholic Church in a time of unparalleled crisis. He has to stop speaking in the euphemisms of a political spin-meister and serve as spiritual leader. Either that or he should vacate the Vatican, as Archbishop Vigano has suggested.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is the author most recently of “The Death of Liberalism,” published by Thomas Nelson, Inc.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/10/2018 01:53]